When Keir Starmer blithered that the British state protects free speech “jealously and fiercely and always will”, you could practically hear Britons spitting out their tea in disbelief. This is, after all, a country where police have wrongly arrested people at Speaker’s Corner, of all places. People have been arrested for preaching the Gospel, because a policewoman ‘just [thought] it’s wrong’. At least she could think: other Britons have been arrested literally for thinking.
But policing ThoughtCrime is clearly not enough of a science fiction dystopian reality for Britain’s state enforcers. Having exhausted 1984 as an instruction manual, now they’re leafing through Minority Report. Pre-crime is now a thing in the UK.
Two uniform police officers walk into a pub. Now, this sounds like the start of a joke, doesn’t it? Well, it is Friday after all. Except the punchline here is a rather alarming attack on free speech by the sound of it. Because it’s genuinely true. Two uniformed Met police officers really did walk into a pub in Chiswick, West London. Only they weren’t there for a pint. They weren’t there because they were responding to a disturbance. They were there to, quote, “have a word” with a bloke called Alistair Hilton, who’s a local photographer who’d been posting criticisms of a local Green Party councillor on X.
So, what had he done to break the law? Absolutely nothing. But the rozzers were concerned that he might.
They asked Mr Hilton to step outside so they could read bits of legislation to him and warn him that if he crossed the line, then he might be committing an offence […] they threatened to arrest him if he crossed the line.
If. Might.
The police officers, if you’ve watched the full clip, openly admit that there’s no crime being committed, no offence, nothing unlawful. They said that themselves […]
“Just be aware again that your behaviour that I have seen on certain posts could – and listen to the words I’m saying to you – could be construed as harassment… might be considered harassment.”
In other words: pre-crime. Not what he had done, but what he might do, or what someone might feel about what he had already written. Something that, in any case, would be fully legal.
Political criticism of an elected official on a public platform about a public decision is textbook protected speech. Courts have repeatedly held that political expression attracts the highest level of legal protection. Councillors, like MPs, choose public office and must therefore tolerate a greater degree of robust scrutiny than private citizens. That is the bargain. Hilton was exercising precisely that right. The police themselves conceded no line had been crossed.
Yet two officers were still dispatched. In a country where burglary victims are lucky to get a crime number and a phone call and where tracked stolen cars and phones routinely go unattended because ‘there aren’t the resources’, the Met found the manpower to deliver an informal warning to a man drinking a beer for the crime of criticising a councillor online.
This is the practical face of two-tier policing. Ordinary citizens robbed or burgled are told to contact their insurance. Local politicians who dislike online criticism get a personal doorstep (or barstool) visit from uniformed officers conducting an “awareness exercise”. The chilling effect is the entire point. Ordinary people watching this will think twice before publicly disagreeing with anyone in a council lanyard.
No threats of violence were alleged. The officers never claimed any. They were there solely because a public official had been publicly criticised for a public policy.
Tell us again that the UK state fiercely protects free speech.
